Exhibition on View

When: September 20- October 1st, 2022

Reception: September 23rd 6:00pm-8:00pm

Where: Greensboro Project Space (111 E February One Place) 

Gallery Hours: Tuesdays-Fridays, 12-5pm; Saturdays, 2-5pm

Group Show, Featuring: Adam Carlin with Derek Toomes


More About Coming Soon?

Coming Soon? is a socially engaged art project that uses techniques in speculative and science fiction for diverse communities in Greensboro, North Carolina to imagine how empty storefronts and uninhabited commercial properties could serve their communities. During collaborative visioning sessions with the artist Adam Carlin, graphic designer Irvin Maldonado, and students in Derek Toomes’ Interior Architecture Department at UNC Greensboro, each community will design a pseudo institution that could or should exist in Downtown Greensboro.
Coming soon signs for these fictionalized spaces will then be installed on vacant properties as temporary public art pieces, publicly projecting a potential future that is inclusive and accessible for those who are often under-represented. These ambiguous yet thought-provoking installations will allow the public to pause and contemplate who our current city is truly for, and will empower the constituents of a city to own a future that is often prescribed rather than collectively created.

Adam Carlin
Adam Carlin is a curator, educator, administrator and social practice artist. He is currently the Director of Learning & Engagement at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY. He is also co-Director of the artist project, the Greensboro Contemporary Jewish Museum, a decentralized museum that explores the intersections between contemporary art practices and southern Jewish life. Carlin was previously the Director of Community Engagement for UNC Greensboro’s College of Visual and Performing Arts and Director of UNCG’s off-campus contemporary art center Greensboro Project Space. Other notable projects Carlin co-Founded and co-Directed include Creek Colleges, an organization that created schools on the banks of rivers, lakes, and creeks that are going through active restoration and Some Thing Spacious, an experimental project space in Oakland, CA that focused on participatory art practices. He received a BFA from California College of the Arts and an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University.
Carlin’s practice draws from a variety of histories and lineages. From community organizing principles defined in the civil rights era; to the expanded field of sculpture; to the contemporary canon of socially engaged arts. But first and foremost his practice draws from that which is right in front of him. He makes both permanent and ephemeral projects that are created in context to the external environment, be that a community, a history, a situation, a place, or a person. The projects act as platforms for these constituents to tell their stories, to express their own creativity, and to contribute to a collective idea or action. Some of his personal works often take the form of institutes as artworks which grants artists the power to not only create institutions of their own but to radically reimagine institutional practices in order to counter systemic inequalities that are embedded into the tradition of the arts. Working simultaneously as a curator, educator, administrator, and socially engaged artist, Carlin’s artistic projects have taken the forms of schools, colleges, museums, departments, and various other institutions whose qualities he has co-opted as a container for participatory projects for the public.

Derek Toomes
Derek Toomes is an artist based in Greensboro and Raleigh, NC. Derek is drawn to the iconic imagery of popular culture, as he is equally interested in societal location as a culture inundated by imagery. His sourcing as well as appropriation of images allows Derek to create work that is aesthetically and anthropologically situated within culture, while also commenting on that culture.
He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Interior Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Irvin Maldonado
Irvin Maldonado is a Latine artist currently based in Greensboro, North Carolina, passionate about the creative process and visualizing communication. With an educational background specializing in fine arts, he employs photography, graphic design, and video to produce work that inspires viewers.

https://www.greensboroprojectspace.com/blog-post/coming-soon